Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013

If humankind truly is 'born a rebel', as his Grand Inquisitor declares, perhaps no author's body of literature is more appropriate to read in the context of punk and postpunk than Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose Notes from Underground alone has been appropriated countless times by those who consider themselves members of this specific popular music subculture, Pussy Riot aside. Beyond Notes, however, much of Dostoevsky's thought seems to have found a home in punk culture, the intellectual predilections of which are well-documented. With assistance from M. M. Bakhtin and psychoanalysis, then, this article explores a trio of scenarios in detail to show how and to what effect Dostoevsky has emerged in punk historically: first, as an attempt to grapple with punks' shame in Being; second, as a touchstone for the often crippling 'intensified consciousness' this shame produces; finally, and following The Brothers Karamazov, as a way of approaching the killing of all manner of master signifiers or 'fathers' who generate, even in absence, this shame and paralysis.

This article explores the emergence and development of alternative nightclub culture in Manchester, England, during the 1970s and early 1980s. It takes as its main point of reference the Roxy Room at Pips Disco, the hitherto neglected foundation of Manchester's alternative music club network. The article aims to identify and evaluate a particular sense of connection between the ever-evolving dynamic of the city's punk-imbued club space and the bricks and concrete of its environment. If, as its on-going influence on aspects of both Mancunian culture and urban milieu would suggest, the Haçienda club at first stabilized and then re-defined the parameters of this relationship, then the Roxy Room at Pips Disco instigated what might be termed the initial negotiation. It is this pre-history, then - a root of particular working at leisure patterns and cultural industries development so firmly associated with the Haçienda - that the article seeks to uncover. Utilizing a variety of new interviews with Pips habitués and a number of key figures in the music and cultural industries (all of which were conducted by the author), the article generates new knowledge in its reconsideration of what has remained a marginalized and yet influential presence within Manchester's popular culture history.

My practice-based doctoral project, researched between 2006 and 2011, asked if the rapidly expanding art movement known as Stuckism had an approach that could be related to Punk 'attitude' in the late 1970s. As an active member of the Stuckists, I have had to engage with the same sense of iconoclastic hostility that played such an important role during my time as a Punk musician from 1977 to the present. Whilst Punk operated, first and foremost, in the context of popular music, Stuckism is a creature of the visual arts, a response to dominant trends amongst gallery and museum directors rather than an appeal to radicalized, media-oriented youth. I therefore built my methodological approach on the hope that the 'narrative turn' in contemporary social studies and cultural anthropology offered me a persuasive mechanism for capturing the ongoing development of my practice as a painter with Stuckist and Punk affiliations. As my creative activities have contributed to the idea of Stuckism, I explored how the narratives of identity that I associate with Punk attitude have helped form the identity of the group. I also believed, however, that my own personal experiences had relevance within a wider context, as I felt there was an opportunity to explain Punk attitude through Stuckist practice and vice versa. I had read a number of, what I felt were, misrepresentations of Punk attitude and experience; mostly this was because the practitioners themselves were often absent in these discussions. I wanted to put that right. As the conversations with these practitioners began to develop, the concept of authenticity became a major theme, and this ended up being a significant factor when investigating the link between Stuckism and Punk.

This article will explore whether; in this postmodern era, where secondary sourcing is in the ascendant, where double-coding trumps coherence and where appropriation and sampling signify the triumph of the accidental or the archival; I. Kant is winning the argument that intentionality on the part of an artist is not a prerequisite for aesthetic response. Furthermore, I will explore whether the joyous inclusivity of the punk and post-punk eras has actually led to a counterproductive cultural relativism; an eschewing, on the part of composers or song writers, of the traditional aesthetics and purpose of musical composition; a Baudrillardian distancing from a direct emotional engagement with an audience; and consequently to a cultural dearth in society at wide. I will draw upon my own experience as a songwriter and occasional film score composer as well as my observations of peers in the business to posit that this state of affairs is an alienating one that has contributed to a climate of social disengagement.

Extremely simple graphic symbols were central to the visual culture of the first wave of American hardcore punk. Simple enough to be easily drawn by hand, their accessibility was important to the lived experience of hardcore values of participation and collectivity and contributed to the spread of the subculture outside of commercial channels in the early 1980s. While early British punk had provided models for the critical appropriation of graphic symbols of power, the use of symbols in hardcore was played out between conflicting approaches - the negation and critique of symbols of power as modelled by UK collective Crass and the invention of original, enigmatic branding marks as modelled by the US punk band Germs.

SOMEDAY ALL THE ADULTS WILL DIE! PUNK GRAPHICS 1971–1984, CURATED BY JOHAN KUGELBERG AND JOHN SAVAGE Hayward Gallery Project Space, Southbank Centre, London, 14 September–4 November 2012

PUNK: AN AESTHETIC, JOHAN KUGELBERG AND JOHN SAVAGE (EDS), ESSAYS BY WILLIAM GIBSONW, LINDER STERLING AND GEE VAUCHER (2012) New York: Rizzoli, 352 pp., ISBN 9780847836628, h/bk, £35.00